Why the 2017 NBA Standings Still Matter More Than People Admit
The 2017 NBA standings from the regular season don't lie, but they also don't tell the whole story on their own. What they do reveal pretty clearly is how the Golden State Warriors had already built something that felt almost insulated from normal NBA variance, and how the Eastern Conference was quietly falling further behind without anyone really adjusting their behavior to the reality. Here is what the actual table looked like going into the 2017 playoffs. In the West, the Warriors finished 67-15. Portland came in at 51-31. San Antonio was 55-27. Houston matched them at 55-27 but lost the tiebreaker to second seed based on division winner status. Oklahoma City was 47-35. The Clippers sat at 51-31. The bottom half of the conference was basically a losing record lottery. In the East, Cleveland led at 53-29. Toronto followed at 51-31. Boston came in at 48-34. Milwaukee was 44-38. Charlotte sat at 36-46. The rest were below .500 except Indiana at 42-40.
The gap between first and second in the West was twelve games. In the East it was two. That single number tells you everything you need to know about which conference was actually competitive. I spent a lot of time in 2017 cross-referencing these standings with playoff performance and honestly the correlation was not as clean as most people assumed. Cleveland had the second-best record in the Eastern Conference but still won the championship. The Warriors had the best record in basketball and won theirs. But the real insight is in the teams that missed the playoffs entirely. Washington, for example, finished 42-40 and missed the postseason by two games. They had John Wall healthy for most of the year, which is the kind of variable that changes everything and nobody factored into their outlook early enough. I tracked that team through the spring and the roster construction was obviously flawed from day one. Too much reliance on perimeter shooting, not nearly enough interior scoring threat. When Wall got injured in March, their whole floor balance evaporated and they went 5-9 down the stretch. That pattern repeats in the East almost every year.
What the standings don't show well is home court advantage distribution. The Warriors held home court through the entire Western Conference playoffs because no team below them came close to matching their regular season efficiency metrics. Their net rating was plus-9.8, which was roughly four points better than any other team in the league. That margin is massive over an eight-game series. The Eastern Conference collapse was mostly structural. Cleveland won 53 games with a roster that had almost no depth beyond the starting five. Kevin Love was playing through ongoing back issues the entire season. Tristan Thompson was a liability in the paint defensively. Kyrie Irving carried the ball too hard on both ends. Meanwhile Toronto and Boston were young teams that looked good on paper but had never actually faced a team of Cleveland's caliber in the playoffs. The gap between "good regular season team" and "championship contender" in the East was wider than anyone wanted to admit. One thing I noticed that most people missed: the Warriors were actually slightly less dominant defensively in 2017 than they had been in 2016. Their defensive rating dipped from 103.9 to 106.8. That sounds bad but it didn't matter because their offensive rating jumped from 110.2 to 114.9. They simply outscored everyone by a larger margin. This is important because it means the championship run wasn't built on defensive dominance that year. It was built on volume scoring at an unprecedented rate.
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When you look at the complete playoff results, Cleveland beat Boston in five, Atlanta in six, and Toronto in six before facing Golden State in the Finals. The Warriors swept Cleveland four games to one. The Finals MVP was Kevin Durant, which was controversial to some people but completely logical when you look at the actual playoff numbers. He averaged 26.4 points, 8.2 rebounds, and 4.7 assists on 53-40-89 splits while playing on a team that was already the highest-powered offense in basketball history. The broader takeaway from these standings is that the Warriors had reached a level of regular season dominance that made their playoff path almost entirely predictable from April onward. The Eastern Conference had one legitimate contender and possibly two if you counted Boston as a long shot. Everyone else was competing for draft position. That imbalance has persisted into subsequent seasons and the structural reasons haven't really changed. Salary cap rules favor superteams in certain configurations while simultaneously punishing parity-building through free agency. If you are looking at these standings now for any kind of analysis, the most useful thing to cross-reference is play-by-play efficiency data rather than raw win-loss records. The Warriors won 67 games but some of those victories were blowouts against teams that had nothing to play for. Their actual competitive games against quality opponents were closer than the standings suggested. Cleveland's 53 wins contained several ugly losses to mediocre teams that should have been factored into any serious projection model.
The 2017 standings table is a snapshot of a specific moment where one team had clearly separated itself from the rest of the league and the other conference was entering a multi-year period of decline. Understanding why that happened requires looking beyond the win column. The underlying metrics tell the real story.
